Poor Elijah’s Almanack: empty words and follies

You’ve undoubtedly heard the old saying, “Those who can’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Poor Elijah adapted this maxim for the education world: “Those who can’t remember the past call themselves innovators.”

One such traveling in-service expert specialized in the pressures of growing up in the 21st century. “These are kids,” he declared, “living under the threat of nuclear destruction!”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Poor Elijah whispered, “but I thought we were the generation that grew up digging fallout shelters.” I reassured him that I, too, remembered those cheerful 1950s Conelrad warnings about how a warbling siren signaled that an attack was “imminent,” which meant the missiles were already on the way down. Back in sixth grade, I’d been the kid under the next desk waiting for the all-clear.

Not that children today don’t have plenty to worry about. But it’s silly to assert that there’s some novel hardship in growing up nuclear three-quarters of a century after Hiroshima, or that lockdown drills are more traumatic, or any more effective, than air raid drills. In any case, American students aren’t losing academic ground because of the bomb or international terrorism or school shootings.

No one would deny that we want our children to read, and that literacy should be a primary concern for schools, parents and society. But what does the education world churn out? Anyone who’s putting his faith in the saving grace of the expert-designed Common Core needs to reflect back on the Clinton-era federally-funded, blue ribbon, two-year study, also conducted by “experts,” that concluded, believe it or not, that students should learn phonics and also read good books.

Was there anyone on the planet, except oracles with advanced degrees in education, who didn’t know this already?

One school system near me announced its groundbreaking initiative to “discuss preliminary planning” with an eye to “formulating a vision and developing a plan.” This cutting-edge proclamation appeared under a headline which could just as nonsensically have appeared in yesterday’s paper, “District Focuses on Reading in Elementary School.”

What else are elementary schools supposed to focus on?

What does it mean when a superintendent inaugurates a new “team concept of teaching” with student reading “groups broken down into more manageable numbers”? Unless he’s planning to hire more teachers, specifically teachers who know how to teach reading, like many allegedly bold administrative pronouncements, it doesn’t mean anything. That’s because the only way to make large numbers more “manageable” is to divide students into more groups, which requires more teachers, which he had no intention of hiring.

How about this mouthful? Take one “review of the educational process” conducted by an “advisory committee.” Then stir in another “vision,” this time to “create an educational support system” to “deal with behavioral and instructional problems to meet the individual needs of students.”

English translation? Establish a committee to help your teachers fix children who aren’t learning. Appoint a few teachers to the committee, but be sure most of the team members are specialists who don’t teach in a classroom and don’t know the student they’re talking about. Next, move behavior problems and students who don’t know how to read out of special education settings and back into the regular classroom. That way the students with behavior problems will make it more difficult for everyone to learn, and the students who don’t know how to read will be more likely to lose further academic ground and slow their more literate classmates down. This, on the positive side, will give the committee more students to talk about in the future.

At first here in Vermont, we called these committees Instructional Support Teams. Then after a couple of years, state officials rechristened them Educational Support Teams. Today we call them Multi-Tiered Systems of Support Referral Teams. Not surprisingly, renaming them didn’t make them more effective.

Homework is another domain where common sense gets lonely. First there’s the puzzling notion which enjoys considerable popularity among experts that assigning homework is unfair because some students won’t do it. That’s because children who do their work tend to do better in school. This allegedly discriminates against children who don’t do their work.

Think back to your school days when you started getting real homework. What grade were you in? If you’re remembering somewhere around fifth or sixth grade, your recollection is the same as mine. You also agree with “more than 100 studies” which confirm that “homework begins to pay off” in the middle school years. Research has determined, in yet another flash of insight, that homework has a “noticeable effect” on learning, especially as students get older.

Why do we need 100 studies to tell us what common sense and experience should have already taught us? Why are we compelled to experiment with every faddish extreme — whole language, new math, no-facts history, no-books science, no-fault behavior, and the latest smoke-and-mirrors charade: proficiency-based grading?

Reformers often charge that classroom teachers are unwilling to change. This isn’t the problem. The truth is we’re too willing to change, and the proof is the procession of students we’ve turned into guinea pigs.

Many of the problems at school aren’t at school at all. They’re at home.

But schools don’t make things better by hiding behind empty words and chasing after follies.

Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vermont. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.